Saturday, 21 November 2015

This is likely to be my last
post for this year because in a couple of weeks I will be visiting my living
relatives and won’t have time for writing about deceased ones. So, I thought I would write about someone who hints
at some particularly intriguing ancestry.

My ancestor Mary Hastings was
born sometime before October 1671, the daughter of Henry Hastings and sister of
Anne. I don’t yet know her mother’s
name. Mary married Richard Preston after
1697, his second wife. Mary and Richard
had at least four children, a son, Robert, and at three daughters, including my
ancestor Letitia. Mary died in 1765,
aged about 100 years old. Her Hastings
great grandfather had lived to a similar age.

Richard Preston was not a
good choice of husband. He had moved to
Ireland from England to live in retirement, having lost what was left of his
family’s fortune through gambling and an extravagant living. He already had a son and heir by his first
wife. The Preston’s were Catholic
Royalist landed gentry (they supported the losing side in the English Civil
war). Richard’s branch of the family was
from Cockerham, Lancashire, and the lineage can be found in various early
editions of Burkes Landed gentry. Some
of the later Preston lineages say that Mary Hastings was the relict (widow) of
a Mr Dennis, however I think this is likely to be confusion with Richard
Preston’s first wife, Mary Dennis.

So why am I writing about
Mary Hastings when I seem to know so little for certain about her life? It is because she was mentioned in an investigation
into the Huntingdon Peerage conducted around 1820 by the Attorney General. The details of the investigation are covered
in “The Huntingdon Peerage” by Henry Nugent Bell (which can be found via Google
Books and other similar web sites).

In 1789, the title of Earl of
Huntingdon, held by the Hastings family, fell into abeyance. Eventually, a male claimant wanted to prove
that he was the heir to the title. To do
this, he had to prove that there were no other more senior male members of the Hastings
family to inherit it. As a result, a great
deal of research was done into the various male lines of descent in the
Hastings family.Mary’s father, Henry
Hastings, was one of the descendants of the 4th Earl of
Huntingdon.Mary and Ann were the only
known children of Henry Hastings, so he had no known male heirs to calm the
title.

I found the investigation of
the Huntingdon peerage of particular interested because it shows how quickly a
family line can die out, causing problems with the succession of titles. The 3rd Earl of Huntingdon had six
sons but the first two failed to have any male children and the third son’s
male lines of descent disappeared within a few generations, so eventually the
title went to a descendant of the third son.
Curiously, the currently holder of the title doesn’t have any sons and wasn’t
the son of the previous title holder, so succession issues continue.

Getting back to Mary Hastings;
Mary and her sister, Anne, were mentioned in the will of Ann Hastings nee
Cracknell, their grandmother, who lived in Dorset and died in 1672, having
written her will in October 1671. Ann
included a lot of detail about her children and grandchildren in her will. She left little went to Henry or his children. My assumption is that Henry, as oldest
surviving son, had succeeded to property from his father and older brother.

As what was left of Richard
Preston’s fortune went the son of his first wife, Mary was left with very
little to support her young family after he died in 1721. According to the obituary of Mary Hasting’s
grandson in The Gentleman’s Magazine (see Google books), after Richard Preston
died in 1721, she was supported by Theophilus Hastings, 9th Earl of Huntingdon,
for many years.

The peerage investigation mentions
that Henry Hastings and his daughters had moved to Dublin by 1682. That seems to be the last known record of his
life. As any family historian knows,
researching Irish ancestors is difficult, if not impossible; so uncovering more
about the Mary’s life in Ireland will be quite a challenge. However, much her of ancestry is another
matter and is the stuff of history books, so may not be the topic of many
future posts.

About Me

I am an Aussie living in England. For a few years I have been writing as a hobby and thought it was time to share my writing more widely. I have a blog for fiction and a blog for stories from my family's history.